Evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, October 17, 2009, 03:23 (5515 days ago) @ dhw


> "Ar. Ramidus thus indicates that the last common ancestors of humans and African apes were not chimpanzee-like and that both hominids and extant African apes are each highly specialized, but through very different evolutionary pathways."
> 
> Forgive me if I continue to go my own ape-like way, but there are things that remain unclear to me. I don't understand how one can draw conclusions about the "last common ancestors" through a hominid fossil from approx. 1.6 million years later than those ancestors. Nobody knows what the common ancestor was like, but it seems reasonable to assume that it was more primitive than its descendants. Ardi was already a hominid, even if she was not as advanced as Australopithecus. The fact that she was different from modern chimps (which for all we know may also have evolved) and followed a different evolutionary path is surely only to be expected if the split had taken place 1.6 million years earlier. So what's new?-The expectation was that the common ancestor was more ape-like, following Darwin's suppositions. Ardi is more 'advanced' than was expected. The common ancestor may be further back that 6 million years with this finding about Ardi. The fork in the road at great,great, great,great Granddad is probably not a Y, but more like a T with the two lines taking off at 180 degrees from each other.
> 
>Ardi didn't have a huge brain. Nor did Lucy. Their brains were more chimp-sized than human-sized. Couldn't that fit in with the idea that they still retained features inherited from a common ape-like ancestor?-The reason for the same sizes is the brain increase in size was one of the last things to happen in the evolutionary development of humans.
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> However, if you believe in a Creator, you can argue that each evolutionary step forward is God making progress towards his ultimate invention: the thinking machine that is man. With the apes he got pretty close, but there was still something missing....so he fiddled with the pelvis, the hands, and above all the brain till he got us. Or you can say he set up the programme for it all to happen. But this scenario also has apes and hominids splitting from a primitive unknown common ancestor, and evolving their own separate ways, with the hominids developing eventually into us. And so, in conclusion, I still don't see how Ardi ... as one of the evolving hominid line ... disproves Darwin.-Darwin thought we came from apes. He didn't know any better. Your proposal, believing in a Creator, that God possibly arranged the whole thing, is a possibility. If pre-hominids are the direct line to humans, with apes as an offshoot, it at least looks like pre-planning, not accidental 'chance mutation/ natural selection'. As complex as the DNA mechanism is turning out to be, is part of what convinces me that there is a UI behind it all. I've stated many times evolution occurred, but I am convinced, and this new Ardi evidence convinces me further that evolution is pre-planned in the multi-layered setup of DNA, RNA, histone control, epigenetics with methylation, and so forth. It gets complexer and complexer, meaning chance is much less likely.